When writing fanfiction, what is an acceptable gap between chapters?

It could be due to responsibilities and other duties, it could be something catching the authors interest like a new game or other form of entertainment. Either way, it is common for there to be large gaps of time between published fanfic chapters when writing.

To those who read and/or write fanfiction, what do you consider to be the longest acceptable gap in time between fanfic chapters when writing?

 

If the modding community can get away with the phrase "It'll be done when it's done" then you too can get away with the same phrase.

 

Unless I paid you in cash or in kind with specific deadline, I couldn't care less how wide the gap is.

 

With "Dreams of Starlight" I've found that cadence has an effect.

If I update every 1-4 days, I have people manually refreshing my page, and my comment section feels like an ongoing conversation.

That conversation dies at about 5 days between updates, and at 7+ I get a couple pings with people asking if I've abandoned the thread.

I imagine that setting expectations like "update once a week" or once every two weeks, would have people checking in periodically.

Past that, the conversation feels "asynchronous" where I'd expect people to come across my story whenever they found it / remembered it, and read several chapters of backlog.

But, ultimately, tell yourself that you're donating time to entertain other people. If you enjoy that, awesome. And if you don't, or have other priorities, you have no obligation to continue.

 

In principle, I’d say a fanfic author doesn’t owe their readers any sort of deadline or punctual schedule to follow.

In practice, especially if there is an earnest and loyal readership(that could of course find another way to spend its time), I’d say a month to three months.

Six months or longer and the fic may as well have been abandoned and then returned to.

Much less a years long absence.

But it depends on the size and scale of the fic, the quality readers expect, and so on.

 

It depends on how much you want the audience to engage in your fanfic. It also depends on the fandom. I've seen Worm fanfics go months upon months without updates, but the thread is running as strong as ever. A larger fandom also means the potential for non-OP omakes increases which further increases engagement in a thread. But for mid-sized fandoms it's usually a month or two before engagement tapers off.

Personally I prefer shorter chapters with more frequent updates. Give me a 2k word chapter every month than a 6k word chapter every 3 months.

 

Basically this, with the caveat that coming back to a long-abandoned fic isn't necessarily very easy for the author either.

I've seen a few stories that had been resurrected after multiple years; they tend to feel like the author remembered that they wrote a neat idea, but had completely forgotten where they were supposed to go with it, and just continued randomly.

 

There’s also the lapse of interest. If you abandon a fic and come back to it three years later, the readers will have likely moved on for something else.

This can and does often lead to an author excited to be back, only to get dejected when there wasn’t near the interest when the fic was originally ongoing.

 

I pretty much agree with this. Unless you've set a deadline for yourself and tell your readers what it is, this is basically how it operates. I did a short fic once where there I would end up going 2 weeks between chapters without even meaning too because I had other stuff going on. I feel like if a fic is left longer than like, 3 months without an update it's considered dead unless the author has said otherwise before or during the break.